Visual Basic 2010 (Windows) Guide
Fractals: The Future

If you have made it this far and have implemented all of the code and suggestions on these pages, you have done extremely well. This is a complicated area.

There are many things that can be done to improve this application and make it more useful to others as well as allowing more interesting images to be produced.

Saving Files

The images that you produce can be saved to disk quite easily. Look back through the site for help on how to make some dialog boxes to make this work.

Saving Settings

Suppose you come across an interesting image and want to alter the colouring algorithm. It might be difficult to return to the exact same spot. Procedures to save and load settings in a text file would allow you to do that. The main parameters to save and load are,

  • minA
  • maxA
  • minB
  • maxB
  • maxIterations

Keeping Track Of Views

Suppose you zoom in on an area and find that you want to go back to the image you had before. A worthy endeavour would be to add an undo feature to the application.

Suppose you created a structure called ViewSettings. If all 5 of the values listed above are fields in this structure, you would have a data structure that can store all of the information required to replot a 'view'. Store these in an array of the ViewSettings and you can write procedures to move back and forward along the list of views created. You would need to prevent the user trying to go back beyond the first view and forward beyond the last.

User Colouring

You could adapt your colouring algorithm to allow the user to supply the colours for the image at runtime. This would allow you to work with a zoomed view to produce a more interesting image. A dialog box or some controls on the form would make this easier.

Go Webbing

The world of fractals is big, man. The pages on this site are scratching the surface of a big old world.

A little exploration of the web might give you some ideas for different ways to colour the images as well as some different types of fractal image.

Cellular automata can also produce interesting effects from simple rules.